Is Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis I, a liberal or a conservative? Does he represent reform or regression? These questions, which we will hear all too often over these next few days, represent the triumph of ideology over observation. Let me suggest that the practice in the British and American press of presenting Rome as an extension of our own domestic squabbles is supremely misguided.

What we have seen in the election of the last three popes is a cautious reaching out of the majority-Italian College of Cardinals to the rest of the Catholic world, a fact recognized by Francis in his opening address on the balcony over St. Peter's Square. We had a Polish pope and then a German pope and now an Argentinian, albeit one with strong ties to Italy and Germany.

In the case of John Paul II, a prince of the church from Soviet-dominated Poland, you could argue that the Catholic Church was trying to send a message about the great struggle of the time. And now, I would argue that it is sending a different sort of message about the future of the faith. Catholicism is booming in South America, and Francis played no small part in that growth.

By picking the first pope from the Americas, the Catholic Church is saying something about itself: that it is a truly global religion that ought to be vital to every tribe and nation, and that it is willing to embrace those places where the seed of faith takes root.

From the balcony, the new pope asked the crowd, Before I bless you, would you please first bless me. It's a shame he didn't ask them to do so out loud. The cacophony would have had a sort of anti-Tower of Babel effect, signaling that beneath all the clashing tongues there is truly one Catholic faith.

Americans tend to know far too little about the recent history of South America, especially considering our own country's often scandalous role in shaping that history. If an Argentinian pope brings American Catholics to a greater awareness of the church in South America, with its powerful commitment to social justice and longstanding witness to the struggles of the poor and oppressed, that alone will be a significant benefit.

Any reminder of the breadth of the church – like the election of a non-European, Jesuit pope – can be a helpful corrective to Americans' tendency to view our nation's problems and priorities as the pope's only concern. One reason the church in Rome will never be as progressive as many Americans would like is that the pope must keep an eye on his entire flock. It is good to be reminded of that whenever frustration mounts.

It remains to be seen whether the new Pope Francis will be able to reform the Vatican bureaucracy and introduce greater collegiality and collaboration to the church's governance. That is what the church around the world and in the United States needs most: without serious reforms in Rome, the new pope is sure to make many of the same mistakes as Benedict (likely relying on the same bad advice). But he may still prove to be the pope Americans need in other ways.

Pope Francis, as he stepped onto the balcony of St Peter's and took in the cheering crowds below, did not look like a man who enjoys basking in applause. After all the media hoopla surrounding his election, his evident humility and sincerity – and his lack of camera-readiness – was a refreshing anticlimax. The former Cardinal Bergoglio has been spoken of as a man who could transcend divisions in the church, combining concern for the poor (and the occasional sharp critique of exploitative economics) with religious conservatism.

The polarized American church needs just that kind of leadership: someone everyone can both admire and be challenged by.

The new Pope Francis inherits a church in a number of crisis. In the west, it faces a secularism that was birthed to pen in and domesticate the expression of Christianity in the public sphere. In Latin America, it faces the same along with an insurgent Protestantism on the other. In Africa, it stands in nations that experience disorder and seems in a pitched and occasionally violent confrontation with Islam. In China, the Vatican has seemed to bungle managing the complex relationship between an underground church faithful to Rome, and an official state-approved church that suffers from the interference of the local government. It's own curial offices are a den of intrique, and it's bank is widely regarded (inside the Vatican) as a front for mafia money-laundering and financial chicanery.

Worldwide the church suffers from a clergy of low quality both intellectually and morally. Fifty years ago priests complained of being trained in a rote "manual theology," but the attempted solution in many seminaries was to give up on Latin, on Thomistic philosophy, and on systematic and Biblical theology altogether. Most distressingly, of course the church has been marked in many countries by sexual depravity of its prelates.

In its theology, Pope Benedict XVI charted a middle course in the post-Vatican II Church. He insisted that the council's true meaning was only just now being discovered and that it was in continuity with the broad tradition of the church before the council. This has become something like an orthodox view, but there will likely be a conflict with hardened traditionalists or modernizers, who insist that the council and the accompanying reforms of religious life and Catholic worship constituted a rupture with tradition.

Pope Francis I's reign will not be defined by the terms of the rest of the world or by the priorities of the media. It will be characterized by how he meets the above challenges, of governance, diplomacy and, discipline within the church. He begins on a note of novelty. He is the first Jesuit, the first pope from the new world, and the first to take the name Francis. It remains to be seen whether these novelties mean a reign of reforming "a church in ruins" as St. Francis was called to do, or whether it means a continued era of experimentation and laxity.